The Prophet of Bethel Meets the Man of God from Judah, Lambert Jacobsz, 1629 – (Lambert Jacobszoon) ◄ prijašnji Sljedeći ►

Umjetnik: Lambert Jacobszoon

Datum: 1629

Veličina: 83 x 111 cm

Tehnika: Oil On Canvas

The biblical story depicted here is a frightful one involving disobedience, gullibility and deceit. The man of God from Judah, who had preached in Bethel, was tricked into accepting a prophet’s invitation to eat and drink in his house, thereby unwittingly disobeying God’s command not to return to Bethel (I Kings 13:11-22). As the result of his disobedience, he was killed by a lion after leaving his host. Lambert Jacobsz shows the moment in the story when the old prophet of Bethel lies to the man of God from Judah claiming that an angel had commanded him to bring the latter back to Bethel to eat and drink in his house (I Kings 13:18). This scene had already been used for the staffage in some 16th-century Dutch landscape paintings, but it was Dirck Volckertsz Coornhert’s series of engravings after Maarten van Heemskerck showing four episodes from the story of the man of God that became a source for the Pre-Rembrandtist painters.3 Moeyaert’s painting of the invitation scene has been dated to around 1627 by Astrid Tümpel, that is two years before Lambert Jacobsz’s.4 As in the Coornhert engraving, the man of God is seated on the ground beneath an oak tree, and the prophet of Bethel stands beside him. Unlike Coornhert’s engraving, Moeyaert’s composition is horizontal in format, and includes a landscape view on the right. Jacobsz seems to have followed the basic composition of the Moeyaert painting. Unlike Moeyaert, though, Jacobsz has included only the two main protagonists in the foreground, and has used the tree and bushes as a screen behind the figures. The prophet of Bethel sits on the ass and points to the way he came, the road that leads to his house. Jacobsz’s manner of depicting the story, therefore, also differs from Moeyaert’s, as Moeyaert’s prophet of Bethel points upward, alluding to the angel who he (falsely) claimed told him to invite the man of God to his home. Van der Meij-Tolsma has argued that Lastman’s 1624 Abraham and the Three Angels was the specific source for the composition of the present painting, as well as for the pose and physiognomy of the man of God.5 While the man of God does indeed resemble the Abraham in the 1624 Lastman painting, the pose of Jacobsz’s figure is closer to that of the figure in Coornhert’s engraving. The compositional type, with a few figures shown in the left foreground close to the picture plane before a screen of trees, and a distant landscape view on the right, was already employed by Jacobsz in his earliest dated work, the 1624 Rest on the Flight into Egypt.6 The general influence of Lastman and Moeyaert is also apparent in such features of the present painting as the Italianate landscape, and the use of intense, local colours – violet, crimson, pink – for the figures’ robes. Jacobsz’s simplified drapery style is closer to that of Moeyaert than of Lastman. Jacobsz also depicted another episode from the biblical story of the man of God. However, that painting, showing The Chastisement of the Man of God,7 was executed in Jacobsz’s other manner, with large, half-length figures in a composition similar to that of Caravaggio’s London Supper at Emmaus.8 Jonathan Bikker, 2007 See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 154.